Larger, LTE-enabled next-gen Moto E pops up on Best Buy site for $100

This may be a Sprint-subsidized price, but the upgrades look promising.

The budget phone is still pretty spare, but it includes all of the basic stuff a phone needs.

Best Buy

It looks like black is the default color. The original Moto E also came in a white body, and both could be customized with colorful rear shells—expect that to continue here.

Best Buy

There's still no LED flash on the back of this phone. Otherwise, standard Motorola design.

Best Buy

The original Moto E wasn't setting any benchmarking records, but like the more expensive Moto G, it was worth a look because it was a great value for the price. We've seen enough leaks of the next-generation Moto E to know that it's coming, but a listing on Best Buy's site yesterday (spotted by Android Police) gave us an especially close look at the device and its specs.

The body of the next Moto E keeps the spartan, only-the-basics design of its predecessor—there's no LED flash on the back, and the port selection is limited to a headphone jack on top and a micro USB port on the bottom. Power and volume keys are still on the right side. The 4.5-inch display is slightly larger than the 4.3-inch one in the older Moto E, but the resolution is the same at 960×540. 244 PPI should still be sharp and detailed enough for most people shopping for budget phones, but it may be easier to pick out individual pixels than it was on the original Moto E.

The internal specs are promising, if still low end. The original Moto E included only 4GB of internal storage, of which only 2GB or so was free for use—the new Moto E expands this to 8GB. We don't know if the new Moto E includes a microSD card slot, but it seems like a safe bet since the original Moto E and the new Moto G both include one. The phone still has 1GB of RAM, which should be sufficient for most uses.

Further Reading

The Best Buy site only tells us that the Moto E has a 1.2GHz Qualcomm SoC with LTE (another new addition), but not which SoC we're looking at. The original Moto E used a dual-core Snapdragon 200 processor. If the new Moto E also uses Qualcomm's lowest-tier SoCs, the presence of LTE would suggest that we might be looking at some heretofore unannounced version of the Snapdragon 210, but we'll have to wait and see to be sure. These 200-series Snapdragons are still 32-bit rather than 64-bit, so while the Moto E in these press shots is running Lollipop, you'll still be using 32-bit Android. Since the vast majority of the ecosystem, Lollipop or otherwise, is still 32-bit, this won't cause problems for the time being.

The most interesting thing about this Moto E listing is the price, which at $99.99 is actually $30 less than the current model. However, the version that cropped up on Best Buy's site was a Sprint model rather than an unlocked version. It's not uncommon for budget prepaid phones to be locked to a specific network and offered at a lower-than-unlocked price. It may be that the standard unlocked version of the new Moto E is still $130 or even a little more.

In any case, the Moto phones have been such a good value in the past that we'll definitely be keeping an eye out for more details on this one—your money goes a longer way, and Motorola is reasonably prompt about updates (even though the original Moto X, Moto G, and Moto E are all still waiting for their Lollipop updates). The Best Buy listing has since been pulled, but its appearance suggests that the launch of the new Moto E isn't far off. Once it's here, we'll get one and give it the full review treatment.

Listing image by Best Buy

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Andrew Cunningham
Andrew has a B.A. in Classics from Kenyon College and has over five years of experience in IT. His work has appeared on Charge Shot!!! and AnandTech, and he records a weekly book podcast called Overdue. Twitter@AndrewWrites